My Honour is Loyalty
by Azdak
Summary: Unterscharführerin Krein learns an important lesson


_Meine Ehre heißt Treue _- SS motto

It wasn't Barbara's place to criticise Rolf, who was a man and an officer, but she couldn't help thinking that he could hardly have bungled things worse if he had been angling for a posting to the Eastern front. Heart drops! Since when did the Gestapo need heart drops to get them through a case? Especially an important one like this. She knew it was important, not just because he was here - any excuse would do for Rolf, who was itching to prove he could out-interrogate Stirlitz - but because she'd listened behind the door to his conversation with the pianist when he arrived. The Russian was in her charge, after all. She needed to be informed of any changes in her status. And anyway, all the conversations in that room were recorded. Somewhere in the RSHA a tape recorder churned away day and night, committing to memory every footstep, every sigh, every throwaway utterance. Presumably Stirlitz listened to the tapes. She imagined him saying to Gruppenführer Müller, "Unterscharführerin Krein is doing very good work with the Russian pianist, exposing the weaknesses in her ideology." Stirlitz would find out from the tapes what Rolf had been up to, but he might appreciate an early tip-off. It could be something important.

It was just as well she had. From Rolf's raised voice - he was always excitable, but today he seemed positively neurotic - she gathered that the Russian resident spy had been captured. And Rolf thought the pianist knew him. Barbara could have told him better. She had spent days in the Russian's company, not just working with the enemy but living with her. The girl was a mouse. She crept about on tiptoe, her face set in that irritating tragic expression, only coming to life when she was allowed to nurse the baby. She talked then, sometimes even sang, little snippets of nursery rhymes and folk songs. Once she started to sing in Russian; Barbara had soon put a stop to that. When the baby was taken away, she sat hunched over her empty arms, saying nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing. The idea that a passive lump like that might have been trusted with meetings with the resident was absurd. She didn't even know the ciphers. She was just a glorified typist, a role which required neither brains nor personality. Which was just as well, really.

But if Rolf wanted to make a fool of himself, trying to extract information the Russian couldn't give, Barbara had no objection. Let him prove Stirlitz had been right all along. Rolf had been livid when he heard that Stirlitz had turned the pianist - and after only one interrogation session, too! - and had given vent to his feelings all over the canteen. "She was mine!" he said, prodding viciously at his turnip mash. "Müller kicked my arse six ways to Sunday when he found out he'd snatched her from under my nose. And you know what really rankles? That back-snabbing snake was the one who told me to take it slowly! 'Leave her there for a couple of days,' he says, 'her contacts are bound show up.' Contacts, my arse! He wanted to nip in and grab the glory for himself."

"It was for the good of the Reich," said Barbara. "He persuaded her to cooperate, didn't he? Whereas your methods are more - well, shall we say hit-and-miss?"

She felt a twinge of satisfaction at Rolf's injured glare. In Barbara's opinion, Rolf needed taking down a peg or two. He strutted around the place, chest puffed out, the department's hard man, the one Müller called in when all other efforts had failed. The day she was given this assignment, Barbara had brought coffee down into the basement for him. The air had had a grimy feel to it that made her want to wash her hair afterwards, and round the corner someone had been screaming, loud enough to hear through the walls and through the thick steel door. She had been very glad, then, that her own contribution to defeating the Reich's enemies was via merciless coffee-making, and not whatever it was that went on down there.

"It's a man's job," Rolf had said, when he saw her face. "Not everyone's got the stomach for it. Your precious Stirlitz can talk the hind legs off a donkey, but you never see him tackle any of the really tough cases. He might break a fingernail."

But it was Stirlitz who had broken the pianist's resistance, and without laying a finger on her. Rolf might sneer at him behind his back for being soft, but look where Rolf's methods had got them. Besides, no one who knew Stirlitz could think that his restraint was an expression of weakness. He didn't believe in shooting all his powder straight off, that was all.

They should have sent Stirlitz now, instead of Rolf. He would never have let things get this out of hand. The pianist unconscious, or dead, the baby screaming its lungs out, Rolf flouncing around like a prima donna, and Helmut, his eyes cast down, heart bleeding all over the floor. Helmut was wasted as a man. Sometimes she itched to slap some virility into him, to make him straighten up, grow a spine. He wasn't a bad physical specimen, but God, he was so cowed and submissive. No wonder his wife had left him.

If Stirlitz had come, there would have been none of this chaos and screaming. He had said to her, when he chose her for the assignment, "Remember, she won't run away as long as we have a hostage. The child's our main leverage, so make sure he's properly looked after." But Rolf, that half-wit, had jumped straight to the baby. What was he going to do when the pianist couldn't tell him anything? Kill it? Then they'd have no hold over her at all.

Rolf, strengthened by his heart drops, was yelling into the phone. "Oh, they're talking like friends, are they? Well, let me come over and get friendly with him. We'll see who laughs fucking last!" It barely counted as eavesdropping, anyone could have heard him. Even the pianist fluttered her eyes, her coma penetrated by Rolf's increasing shrillness. It was lucky for him she wasn't dead. It was lucky for all of them - Müller's wrath would hardly have been confined to Rolf if his star witness had managed to put herself beyond interrogation. Barbara had no desire to see the Gruppenführer in a rage. Despite his grandfatherly demeanour, he had a red-eyed, bone-deep cynicism to him that made everyone tread carefully in his presence, and not just because of the department he headed.

And now, presumably, they would all go back to square one. Helmut, white with pity, would bring in the baby. Rolf would rant and shriek and threaten. The pianist - Barbara could feel her trembling as she helped lift her into her chair - would twist her head away and close her eyes but in the end she would be forced to watch. Barbara felt a twinge of pity herself at the thought. She stamped down on it, hard - as an SS officer she knew her duty - but Rolf was making such an unholy mess of things! Stirlitz would have handled it differently.

But even Rolf appeared to have realised he needed to try a new tack. "All right," he snarled, taking something out of his pocket and holding it up the prisoner - a photograph, as far as Barbara could tell from the back - "I'll help you out, if it makes you feel less of a Judas." A photograph of the resident, presumably. It wasn't just a bluff, then. They really had caught him.

The Russian's face went blank. Only her pupils widened, black pools opening in the grey, the way they did when she looked at the baby. My God, that little grey mouse had pulled the wool over all their eyes! She _did_ know the resident! The helplessness, the stupidity - it had all been an act. She must have been laughing up her sleeve at them all! Well, so much the worse for her. There would be no stopping Rolf now. Although really, if he had a photograph of the resident, why hadn't he started with that? Faced with that kind of evidence, the pianist would have admitted her involvement straight off, and they would have been spared all this melodrama. There was no point in denial, after all. Müller was already at work down in his basement, extracting the truth from the resident. All the girl had to do was nod and, for her, it would all be over.

But the Russian was still staring at the photograph, staring and staring, as if into a mirror that was showing her her own future, and with a shiver of dismay Barbara realised that she wasn't going to talk. Not even now. She might look like a dumpy little cushion, but there was a thread of steel running through her. She was willing to watch her baby die rather than betray the resident. Where on earth did it come from, this inhuman stubbornness? She had given in before, when Stirlitz had questioned her. Why turn so obstinate now? For God's sake, Barbara thought, just say yes, will you. Before it's too late.

Rolf flung up his hands in disgust and that was when Barbara saw the photograph. She found herself staring, her gaze caught like a fly on sticky paper, as riveted as the pianist had been. Not by the photograph - Rolf had snatched that away again immediately - but by the image it had shown her. The picture of the resident. And, reflected in his eyes, herself.

An error? A misunderstanding? No. It made horrible, sickening sense. "Leave her there for a couple of days. Her contacts are bound to show up." "The child's our main leverage, so make sure he's properly looked after." "How's our little Russian girlfriend?" What a fool he must have thought her! His fingers wafted through her hair and her treacherous body wailed with grief. What kind of stupid little slut had he taken her for? That was why he had picked her for this assignment. Not for her efficiency or her dedication, or because he liked her, but because he knew he only had to touch her cheek and she would go weak at the knees.

She wrenched the balcony door open, grateful for the sting of the air against her flushed face, and wished, with sudden savagery, for a meat hook and an iron bar. Talking like friends! A man who could betray his country, betray his comrades, betray his Führer! Whatever Gruppenführer Müller was doing to him, it couldn't be bad enough. There could be no mercy towards the Reich's enemies, least of all towards traitors.

A few flakes of snow blew in through the open door, white spots against the polished wood of the table. The baby's screams clouded the air. There was a blue tinge to his skin. Barbara felt an eerie tranquility settle on her like frost. Rage had scoured her of the last trace of weakness, leaving only strength and purity and a kind of quiet joy. They didn't have the Gruppenführer's resources here at the flat, she and Rolf. But they did have the baby. He was their leverage. Hurt him badly enough and his mother would talk. Inflict enough pain and anything was possible. The mother would talk. And then, God help him, the resident would talk. She saw herself as a steel bullet, arcing through sunlight towards her target, bright and deadly and pitiless.

When the gun fired, she was surprised to realise it wasn't her finger on the trigger.


End file.
